http://www.ischools.org/iConference11/2011index/

Our paper, Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia,  about the variety of  roles people perform in Wikis received the best paper award (along with 4 others) in a field of 86 papers.   The 2011 iConference accepted 86 papers, and had about 550 attendees.

The paper is authored by: Howard T. Welser at Ohio University, Austin Lin at Cornell University and Microsoft, Dan Cosley, Fedor Dokshin, Gueorgi Kossinets and Geri Gay at  Cornell University, and Marc Smith from Connected Action.

The paper pdf pre-print is available here: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~welser/Welser.Cosley.plus.Wiki.Roles.pdf

The link to the ACM abstract and pdf: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1940778&CFID=9933318&CFTOKEN=58981138

Abstract: This paper investigates some of the social roles people play in the online community of Wikipedia. We start from qualitative comments posted on community oriented pages, wiki project memberships, and user talk pages in order to identify a sample of editors who represent four key roles: substantive experts, technical editors, vandal fighters, and social networkers. Patterns in edit histories and egocentric network visualizations suggest potential “structural signatures” that could be used as quantitative indicators of role adoption. Using simple metrics based on edit histories we compare two samples of Wikipedians: a collection of long term dedicated editors, and a cohort of editors from a one month window of new arrivals. According to these metrics, we find that the proportions of editor types in the new cohort are similar those observed in the sample of dedicated contributors. The number of new editors playing helpful roles in a single month’s cohort nearly equal the number found in the dedicated sample. This suggests that informal socialization has the potential provide sufficient role related labor despite growth and change in Wikipedia. These results are preliminary, and we describe several ways that the method can be improved, including the expansion and refinement of role signatures and identification of other important social roles.

This year’s CITASA awards have been announced!  CITASA is the Communications and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association.  It gathers together more than 300 sociologists interested in the ways groups of people make use of computation and networks. This year the line up is uniformly high quality scholarship about the nature of societies that increasingly rely upon information technology.

You are welcome to join the CITASA Business Meeting on Aug 8 from 9:30-10:10am at the Parc 55 Hotel where the recipients will be presented with their awards. A description of the awards and list of past recipients can be found on the CITASA website:  http://citasa.org/awards

2009 CITASA Student Paper Award

Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian (University of Chicago)

Putting Social Context into Text: The Semiotics of E-mail Interaction. American Journal of Sociology 114(2): 332-370. (2008).

Committee members: Zeynep Tufekci (Chair), Lori Kendall, and Anabel Quan-Haase

2009 CITASA Award for Public Sociology

Peter Kollock (University of California at Los Angeles)

Committee members: Michael Macy (Chair), Marc Smith, Keith Hampton

2009 CITASA Paper Award

Eszter Hargitta, Jason Gallo, and Matthew Kane (Northwestern University)

Cross-ideological discussions among conservative and liberal bloggers. Public Choice 134: 67-86. (2008).

Honorable mention:

Lori Kendall (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

How do issues of gender and sexuality influence the structures and process of qualitative internet research? pp. 99-118. In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about method, Annette Markham and Nancy Baym (eds). Los Angeles: Sage (2008).

Committee members: Hiroshi Ono (Chair), Rich Ling, and Bernie Hogan

2009 CITASA Book Award

Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University). (MIT Press, 2007).

Committee members: Leslie Shade (Chair), Marc Smith, and Alison Powell

2009 CITASA William F. Ogburn Career Achievement Award

Elihu Katz (University of Pennsylvania)

Committee members: Anabel Quan-Haase (Co-Chair), Barry Wellman (Co-Chair), and Keith Hampton

With a  very nice letter that puts the award in some context:

Ten papers out of 515 at the conference were selected for Best Paper Awards.  Many thanks to track organizers Karrie Karahalios and Fernanda Viegas.

A previous paper in 2006 also got best paper: You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups, by Danyel Fisher, Marc Smith, and Howard T. Welser

Two years before that in 2004 Fernanda Viegas and I also published a paper at HICSS that got best paper: Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces,
by Ferndanda B. Viégas and Marc Smith.

Tom Erickson maintains a great listing of many years of HICSS papers.

Here is Tom Lento receiving the award at the conference in Hawaii earlier this month:

More Best Papers from this year…

	Collaboration Systems and Technologies Track Minitrack: Cross-Organizational and Cross-Border IS/IT Collaboration Paper Title: Breaching the Knowledge Transfer Blockade in IT Offshore Outsourcing Projects – A Case from the Financial Services Industry Authors: Robert Gregory, Roman Beck, and Michael Prifling
	Decision Technologies and Service Sciences Minitrack: Information Systems for Sustainable Development Paper Title: Sustainability of Grasshopper Management and Support through CARMA Authors: John Hastings, Alexandre Latchininsky, and Scott Schell
	Digital Media: Content and Communication Minitrack: Social Spaces: Production and Consumption of Goods in Digital Collectives Paper Title: A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community Authors: Eric Gleave, Howard Welser, Thomas Lento, and Marc Smith
	Electric Power Systems Restructuring Reliability and Cyber Security Paper Title: Infrastructure Protection in the Ancient World Author: Michael Assante
	Electronic Government Minitrack: E-Government Organization and Management Co-chairs: Helmut Krcmar, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, and Maddalena Sorrentino Paper Title: Understanding the “Boundary” in Information Sharing and Integration Authors: Lei Zheng, Tung-Mou Yang, Theresa Pardo, and Yuanfu Jiang
	Information Technology in Healthcare Minitrack:T Adoption and Evaluation in Healthcare Paper Title: Methodological Approaches to Measuring the Effects of Implementation of Health Information Technology (HIT) Authors: Lance Roberts, Marcia Ward, Jane Brokel, Douglas Wakefield, Donald Crandall, and Paul Conlon
	Internet and the Digital Economy Minitrack: Social Networks and Virtual Worlds for Work, Learning and Play Paper Title: Cyber Migration: An Empirical Investigation on Factors that Affect Users’ Switch Intentions in Social Networking Sites Authors:Zengyan Cheng, Yinping Yang, and John Lim
	Knowledge Management Systems Minitrack: Knowledge Management Tools, Technologies, Mashups, and Design Approaches Co-chairs: Stefan Smolnik, Nassim Belbaly, and Richard Orwig Paper Title: The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management Authors: Christian Hirsch, John Hosking, John Grundy, Tim Chaffe, David MacDonald, and Yuriy Halytskyy
	Organizational Systems and Technology Social Issues in Information Technology Paper Title: Making it Hard to Lie: Cultural Determinants of Media Choice for Deception Authors: Christopher Furner and Joey George
	Software Technology Minitrack: Architectures for Distributed Systems Paper Title: Celebrating Diversity in Volunteer Computing Authors: David Anderson and Kevin Reed